The Internet is great for finding recipes, but sometimes, there is nothing like getting a cooking magazine in the mail. I don’t remember how, but I ordered a subscription to Cooking Light magazine, and a few days ago, we got the latest issue. I decided to make use of it and look through it for dinner ideas. I came across the toasted quinoa soup that I mentioned in my quiche post and also came across two recipes that I decided to try together: whole-grain spelt and cornmeal biscuits and beef and barley stew. The beef and barley stew was amazing; I think this was mostly due to Josh’s fresh veggies from the garden and my dad’s grilled tri-tip that I used. The spelt and cornmeal biscuits were a big hit with my whole family… except for me!
Josh and I love cooking and baking with alternative flours. We think it’s fun, even when the results aren’t to our liking. So when I happened across spelt flour, I had to get it, even if it did sit in our cabinet for a while before I found a way to use it!
The biscuits were very, very crumbly! In fact, my daughter enjoyed smashing her biscuit into crumbs and eating the crumbs. Silly girl!
I don’t think this was the fault of the recipe though. At some point in the past, I ordered cornmeal through Amazon Pantry. The problem is, somehow I ordered MEDIUM grain cornmeal, four 12 ounce bags of them. At first, when I saw the bags, I thought that it was great I would have cornmeal to last me awhile. Then, I tried baking with the cornmeal, and the cornmeal was so coarse that I was gritting my teeth on it! I use the cornmeal now just because I need to, but I certainly don’t like baking with it very much.
I’ve tried “chopping” it to a finer grain using a food chopper, but it didn’t help.
Anyway, that cornmeal is what I used in these biscuits. And that is most likely why I didn’t like them. And probably also why they were so crumbly. So these biscuits would turn out great with a different cornmeal. Then again, my family loved these. My oldest even said he liked these better than the plain drop biscuits I had made two days ago! So as Josh told me, maybe I’m just weird!
-Lynn
I’ve never cooking with spelt so kudos on being adventurous.
Sorry about the crumbly biscuits. I’ve done the same thing, buying too coarse cornmeal but I only bought one 1 kg bag. I found if I pre-soaked the cornmeal in buttermilk or soured milk and used it in cornbread/muffins, the coarseness wasn’t too much of an issue. And some people pour milk over sweet plain cornbread and eat it as a dessert so that’s a solution too.
Coarse cornmeal is also great sprinkled on your baking sheet under pizzas to prevent sticking. Finally, you can use it to make polenta where the longer cooking time helps to soften it. It has a nice chew/texture as a polenta especially under something like a beef stew.
Thank you so much for all the ways to use my coarse cornmeal! I was wondering in what ways I could use it that would be palatable to me.
I think I ordered the same cornmeal from Amazon! I haven’t used it yet, but was nervous it would be difficult to work with. I actually clipped this recipe from Cooking Light last week thinking it would be a good test – so funny to see here as well. Thanks for sharing!
Maybe you will have better luck than I did! Though I was the only one who didn’t like the biscuits, so it’s probably okay as is 🙂